WaPo steps in it #yesallwomen

The dramatic social media response to the UC-Santa Barbara shooting, captured by the hashtag #YesAllWomen, underlined an important and unpleasant truth: across the United States, millions of girls and women have been abused, assaulted, or raped by men, and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack. As Sarah Kliff wrote in Vox: a “national survey of American women found that a slight majority (51.9 percent) reported experiencing physical violence at some point in their life.”

This social media outpouring makes it clear that some men pose a real threat to the physical and psychic welfare of women and girls. But obscured in the public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers. The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.

WaPo is having just an all-around great time with the chicks this week. George Will's column has been all the rage on social media because he thinks colleges are going crazy with all this sexual assault garbage, and "they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges."

n addition to the headline, the article itself was problematic, seeming imply the responsibility for addressing domestic violence lies with its victims. But the way the authors presented the data to support their claims was also flawed, according to the author of the underlying study. Two problems stood out immediately.

The op-ed focused on marriage, but marriage isn’t the only thing that could affect intimate partner violence. There could be other factors at play. Intimate violence rates are lower among married women, but we can’t rule out the possibility of confounding variables. To put the point more plainly: “the marrying kind tend to be more educated, wealthier and whiter,” so the focus on marriage should come with some exploration of the fact that education, income and race could also partly explain trends in intimate violence.

One of the charts used in the article (seen at left) comes from a Department of Justice study published in 2012. I got in touch with the study’s author, Shannon Catalano, a statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, who said her chart was presented without sufficient context.

She told me in an email:

The BJS chart used here is limited to one variable, household composition, when we know from previous research that violence is associated with a multitude of factors. Though other researchers have examined these factors, the purpose of the BJS report was not to identify these other factors.

The graph which they used from my report does show clear differences between intimate violence rates — but that is because it is only showing one variable; household composition. The story could change if we started to control for other factors.

We know, for example, that victimization (for several types of violence including intimate partner violence) is much higher for younger males and females, particularly between the ages of 18-24.